Kamala Harris Just Made An Important Commitment On Child Care Policy

Vice President Kamala Harris said on Tuesday that one of her goals as president would be to make sure no family pays more than 7% of household income on child care.

“Sadly, the state of affairs in our country is that working people often have to decide to either be able to work or to be able to afford child care,” the Democratic nominee said during a live interview before a meeting in Philadelphia of members of the National Association of Black Journalists.

“My plan is that no family, no working family should have to pay more than 7% of their income on child care,” Harris added.

The vow was part of a broader comment Harris made about the burdens families face when caring for children or aging relatives ― or for both, as is often the case for members of the so-called sandwich generation.

“It is just absolutely too expensive for them to be able to work and do that,” Harris said.

Harris has talked about the need to support caregiving ever since she launched her presidential campaign in late July, after President Joe Biden dropped out. But several advocates who follow child care closely said Tuesday was the first time they’d heard Harris mention the 7% figure so clearly as one of her policy goals.

“VP Harris has always been a child care champion, but this is the first time Harris the nominee has laid out a specific affordability threshold that maps to legislation guaranteeing access to affordable, high-quality child care,” Melissa Boteach, a vice president at the National Women’s Law Center Action Fund, told HuffPost over email.

A 7% cap could make a substantial difference to millions of Americans. Today, child care expenses represent 8% to 19.3% of median family income, depending on the type of care and the state, according to research by the U.S. Department of Labor.

The idea of limiting child care expenses to 7% of family income is not new. It’s been the goal of leading Democratic lawmakers and reform advocates ever since the Department of Health and Human Services identified it as an “affordability” threshold in 2016.

Among the proposals to incorporate it was legislation from Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) that became part of the “Build Back Better” agenda Democrats tried to pass in 2021. It had strong support from the Biden administration, including Harris.

The proposal failed to pass, partly because it would have required several hundred billion dollars of new federal spending over the course of a decade, and Democrats could not round up the votes to support that.

Harris on Tuesday did not indicate how she would finance a new child care initiative or whether she was committing to the approach of the Murray-Scott bill.

The proposal has gotten plenty of criticism: that it tries to do too much or too little, that it’s too specific about the type of child care it supports or not specific enough. Most of the criticism has come from conservatives, though some has come from liberals, too.

But although Harris didn’t wade into any of those issues on Tuesday, she did indicate she thought of the child care proposal as separate from her proposal to reinstate a pandemic-era program that provided a $6,000, one-year tax credit to families with newborns.

“Harris made clear that her opportunity agenda includes both child care solutions and the Child Tax Credit,” Julie Kashen, senior fellow at the Century Foundation, told HuffPost over email. “Families need both child care solutions and the child tax credit so they have the freedom to work, engage in their communities and make sure their children have the food, clothing, and school supplies they need (among other things!).”